Granularity for Paid Search Success

Many paid search advertisers are beginning to leave behind their paid search efforts because the numbers no longer make sense. But just because everyone’s doing it, doesn’t mean you should too!

Gone are the days of easy top level strategies where you could put up a couple of broad match head terms and call it a day. In many industries these strategies no longer work because there’s a ton of competition driving up your cost that thin out your profits.

Now you have to think more granularly, know your consumer, and be there when they need you.

So how do you go about doing this? Well, it’s not so easy, but there are some strategies that we use at PMG that can be applied universally across all industries:

Break it down by marketThis simple strategy allows you to create your campaign/ad group/ad/keyword lists and duplicate them to target them to different markets. By having duplicate keywords in different markets you are able to adjust bids, and ultimately performance by market as opposed to national. The more granular you can get with your market, the more success you are likely to see because your competitors are not going to be everywhere.

Split out match typesHaving a clear match type strategy will assure you that you are optimizing your campaigns correctly. Your ultimate goal should be to have all your top keywords in an exact match type. Exact match is the only match type that can give you relatively pure performance metrics for users search queries. However, if you just have exact match keywords, there’s really not going to be a way for you to scale your campaigns. This is why we recommend adding at least broad match modifier duplicates of your exact match keywords. Broad match modifier keywords will act as a data mining tool for your search term reports that will show you what keyword opportunities exist for your exact match. This will grow your exact match keyword pool and ultimately lead you to true performance metrics.

Develop a fluid attribution systemThere are many perspectives that you can take when you look at your performance data. If you are using a last click attribution method for your paid search campaigns, chances are that you are not getting the full picture. Since you are likely utilizing multiple marketing channels to drive your business – you’ll find paid search plays a role in more places than just paid search. One study that we conducted here at PMG showed that when a significant amount of spend is attributed to paid search, your bottom line profits grow. Meaning that paid search contributes a lot more to your marketing efforts than at face value. Before going into a full-fledged paid search campaign, make sure you have a solid attribution system in place.

These initial paid search tactics should get you on your way to paid search success, and hopefully convince you that there is always gold to be found in this channel.